We just got our hands on the newest NVIDIA core logic roadmap. Several weeks ago, NVIDIA announced the nForce 500 series chipsets based on the MCP55 controller. The 500 series family includes plans for an nForce 590, 570, 550 and SLI derivatives. NVIDIA has made announcements to its partners that it will now "officially" launch its MCP55 lineup on May 23, 2006, for both Intel Conroe and AMD AM2 motherboards. Expect availability of nForce 590 on both platforms on launch days for each new processor core.

nForce 590 will be the highest performance NVIDIA chipset for AMD AM2 and Intel Socket 775. The chipset will be specifically tweaked for SLI and Quad SLI and feature a new technology called "LinkBoost." LinkBoost will, supposedly, offer increased bandwidth between GPU and MCP if, and only if, the system uses NVIDIA-only components. Currently, only the 90nm GeForce series graphic cards will support LinkBoost, but future high end cards will as well.

The nForce 590 SLI, 570 SLI and 570 Ultra chipsets also features an option called "FirstPacket." FirstPacket apparently is NVIDIA first attempt at packet prioritization, or Quality of Service on the NVIDIA firewall. The new chipsets will also feature a "teaming" feature that will allow for some rudimentary traffic shaping while using both Ethernet connections on the MCP.

The nForce 590 is a two chip package. The SPP uses 90nm TSMC packaging while the MCP is a 130nm TSMC package. Other MCP55 will use similar setups, but will not "relaunch" until later this year. NVIDIA MCP61 showed up on company roadmaps earlier this year and will be the company's first single core motherboard chipset in many years.

And yes, NVIDIA's slides also confirm high definition audio will appear with
nForce 590. SoundStorm2 proponents may or may not see this as a sign
of the apocalypse.

"You can bet that Sony built a long-term business plan about being successful in Japan and that business plan is crumbling." -- Peter Moore, 24 hours before his Microsoft resignation